Lensman 2 was the culmination of HORAGE’s first foray into building a ‘concept’ based timepiece. Our company is known for creativity, a heavy engineering bias and a culture of questioning the status quo. Alongside these hard skills, there is a strong passion for photography within the team: sounds like a perfect match.
The result of this journey is a strikingly unique product: the design language, texture pallet, materials mix and of course a novel re-interpretation of the bezel slide rule to create an exposure calculator all contribute to Lensman 2’s distinctiveness. Yet being ‘different’ can be both a blessing and a curse: just ask the nerds in the school playground.
At every watch show we attend there is a constant stream of fans lured towards the bold yellow Lensman 2 like moths drawn to a lightbulb. Lensman 2 is a watch which comes alive when experienced first-hand. But not every watch fan wants to geek out over camera tech. For 99.9% of planet earth, Bulb and Bokeh might as well be an alien language. This made us realise that by positioning Lensman 2 as the dream timepiece for photography fans we were selling our team and our customers short by creating a firewall around this fabulous watch.
So, we set ourselves the task of democratizing Lensman 2 and re-imaging it for a more diverse audience. The clue was, like so often hiding in plain sight! A dash of yellow tracking around the dial…..the K2 calibre inside was already configured to offer a 24 hr GMT feature, why not expand on this to make the perfect companion for globetrotters.
Over the past fifty years the world has rapidly ‘shrunk’ as travel to far flung corners of the earth has been made more accessible. We embark on adventures with curiosity and an innate desire to experience new and different peoples and places. Sights, smells and sounds which are different to the easy familiarity of being at home. Expanding horizons no longer includes months at sea or a high risk of perishing as in centuries gone by. It was accurate timekeeping which made the expansion of exploring possible, but that’s a story we’ll dwell on another day.
Lensman 2 Global is another first for HORAGE: our first 24 hr GMT watch with world timer, allowing effortless referencing of local time anywhere around the world. If your interpretation of travel includes vaulting over volcanos, swimming through swamps or advancing across the Antarctic, then Lensman 2 Global may not be quite rugged partner you are seeking.
For the rest of us, the tantalizing prospect of a watch which effortlessly combines elegance, versatility and technology into a sleek and lightweight package is almost enough for us to trot off to the local travel agency clutching a well-used chequebook, ready to book some flights……remember that?
Congratulations on the launch! As a Horage and Worldtimer fan, I wish you had gone a bit further on this one.
There are a few ways to execute a worldtimer function:
With a manual city scale that you need to align to local time for every reading. This is what the lensman does
Tweaking a GMT caliber and replacing the 24GMT hand with a 24hr disc. I wish the Lensman offered this. That way you could read the time of all 24hr cities at any point with no manual intervention. You “just” needed to remove the GMT hand to power the 24hr time disc instead (many brands do this and reuse stock gmt movements - eg from Farer in the entry level, all the way up to Ming on the higher end)
More sophisticated worldtimer movements synchronize local and city time, so that you can adjust both when crossing time zones with just a simple click or crown operation. This is the grail for me, but I am guessing this would have meant doing an entire new module that K2 was not designed for. (The canonical example of this category is Patek)
I love the poetry of travel watch. This is a nice expansion for Horage. So close but not quite for me this time…